my nightmares with my computers over the last few weeks made me wonder about other people and their computers.

so, here is a poll thread asking about computers. i hope you will also write your opinions on computers...do you hate them? love them? want more electronic toys? wish you could go back to the 19th century?

give me your thoughts as well as your votes.

this will be a multiple choice poll.

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vote now!!!!

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/N...uba/index.html

My husband is a systems analyst so if there is a problem with our computer hes the one we turn to. My problem now is I wish he would clean it up some, It can get filled up with a lot of junk and with a teenage son using it who knows whats all on it!

Our computer also gets a daily workout, it seems like someone is always on it plus we also have wireless so my husband will be on his laptop as well as my older son.

He swears by Dell computers, that is all we've ever owned and I think that is all we will ever own. Just our personal preference, or should I say my husbands! As long as I can surf the web and get email I'm usually a happy camper.

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I'm an old time user. We have, let's see.....I have a Dell, but it is time for an upgrade. I have the 8200 and it's old. My husband has an XPS, my son has a brand new state of the art XPS (these are all Dell's by the way), I have a brand new lap top (XPS also) and my work computer is a Demension 3100. We all have at least 19" flat screens on them (and my laptop is a 17"). We have all these XPS's because I live with semi-professional gamers.

My son has a BS in Computer Science and an MS in it as well....but he was a Unix System Admin and gave it up to work with his father. So, he keeps all our computers up to speed, except mine...which is old and tired and he's sick of dealing with..he just wants me to buy a new one.

We are all on them all the time so none of us share our computers with each other.

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I am the "guru" at work and home, which is not saying much! I spend hours and money I don't have fixing computers. Hundreds of dollars have gone to the Geek Squad. I will never buy a Dell again, and HP is not high on my list either. I refuse to speak to someone from India who hasn't a clue how to help you. What else is tech support for???

My first computer was a Micron - made and sold in the US. You had free tech-support for life and spoke to someone in Idaho. They would spend all the time you needed to fix your computer - which in my case the computer was fine, it was me tinkering with it that messed it up. It cost $3,000 in 1995.

Next time - a MAC for sure!

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I am an Old timer in that I was trained in Computer Operations way back in the late 70's Most of the jobs I had at that time used the IBM 360/ 370 DOS/VS systems they were the big giant systems that had their own rooms because they were so big with the old Tape Drives and disk systems that looked like records. they had their own Air conditoning and they were set in raised floors so the air could circulate under the machines they also use to use keypunch cards that were loaded into the computer at the time it was called 3rd generation. This was back in 1976-77 when I went to school for Computer operations .

The computer I have now is about 7 years old. A Dell Dimension XPS 450 Mhz I will be buying a new one by the summer. It has served me well as I do use Windows XP so it serves its purpose well But it is slow compared to the stuff today But my system is more powerful then what was used way back in the day and those systems filled a room.

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Born to raise Hell and enjoy every minute of it. Hawklords

Oh my, the memories. In the early 1980's, I was a computer operator on an IBM 360 system DOS system. It was the size of a minivan and needed a special, climate controlled room and a 24 hour staff to keep it (and it's peripherals) all running. Speaking of peripherals, printers were the size of comercial clothes dryers, disk drives were the size of washing machines and tape drives were the size of small closets. It had less memory and a slower operating speed than today's blackberries (2.5 meg, if I recall correctly).

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Once in a while you can get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

Ive got a gateway and its the 2nd one, The wife is on it more than I am doing her homework or on myspace... I just get on to surf and e-mail also. Dell computers are ok but I like the Gateway. I suppose to each his own. The new vista window is somewhat different but as I venture force its becoming easier to use....She lets me get on just long enough to visit this site and learn...

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Larry and Darcy

Wow Charlie I thought I was the only Dinosaur that remembered what those old IBM's looked liked and How they worked. I see that I am not alone in those old systems Just thinking about it now makes me laugh and think hell if these youngsters ever saw what it was once like they may get scared LOL.

I actually had one time when I worked for Chase Manhattan a group of older people taking a tour of our facility and the guy refer to it as the bridge of the Enterprise from Star Trek because you had a seat in the center of the console then you had your keypunch card data entry on one side you had your monitor screen in front of you then on the other side we had a bank of 16 tape drives the old spininng Brown tapes then we had a bank of disk drives Like you said they were about the size of washing Machines we had 16 of them and we had a tape library in a seperate room and when we had a new job or the jobs we were running for that process they would get the tapes out load them on to the drives then we would get the keypunch cards out and load them 1st and that would start the tapes and the disk drives were used for storage of data. this was in 1982-83 Boy that brings back some memories.

I used to work the 4pm- 12 shift and we had at least 12 people working this computer system because remember we also had the big IBM Printers that had to be loaded and fed paper. We had a seperate crew just for that we had 2 tape librarians in their room with rows and rows of tape that were sorted by numbers. we had 2 systems Analyst to make sure everything ran correctly and their were no glitches with the system. Some people just don't know that it took a crew to run a single computer in those days Not like today where one person can run everything . Ahhh Modern Technology

One of the reasons I left the operations part of the business and went to school to learn how to fix computers was because my skills and trainning were on 3rd generation but computers were getting smaller and they were going into 4th and 5th generation technology and of course you didn't need all the people to run a single system.

That was when I went for my digital technology degree on repairing computers that was in 1985-86.

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Born to raise Hell and enjoy every minute of it. Hawklords

No, Ron, you are not the only dinasaur. We were still running applications on cards when I left that company in 1987. I still shake my head about that but some old habits die hard, I suppose.

The head of our data processing department had an ego the size of all of Alabama and our computer room (which was big enough to hold a basketball court and an olympic size swimming pool with room for bleachers) had a big picture window next to a busy hallway. The operating consoles were, of course, just on the inside of that window and we had an array of six CRT's in a semi-circle where we would sit to enter commands. It was very much like sitting inide a fishbowl.

The tape drives were directly in front of us (they have moving parts and the guy that designed the room wanted moving parts) but the head of DP (the one with the ego) didn't think that there were enough dials, switches and knobs so he had our engineering department build a monstrosity that sat in the middle of the array of CRTS that had indicator lights and remote controls for stuff like turning exterior lights on and off (read - a lot of knobs, lights and switches - he never could figure out how to justify any dials). It was a standing joke amongst the entire department. We had a name for the thing but the forum censor software makes it show up as a bunch of asterisks.

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Once in a while you can get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right.